Chuck Wendig's WAYWARD (Narr by Dominic Hoffman and Xe Sands)

Not long before COVID-19 first swept the globe, Chuck Wendig gifted the world with a retroactively prescient story of a pandemic that threatened to end civilization, but only as background to an even stranger tale. Wanderers first presented us with a bizarre phenomenon that shared some qualities of a pandemic but more with a thriller plot, as first a lone teenaged girl and then soon hundreds of others began walking, implacably and seemingly mindlessly, on an unknown path to an unknown but very distant destination in a weird and compulsory pilgrimage around the United States. 

Spoilers for that first novel are inevitable in this post, by the way. 

By the end of Wanderers, we learned what had caused this strange migration - nanobots in the Wanderers' bodies that shunted their minds into a shared virtual reality of life in a small Colorado town that was their eventual destination while turning their bodies into inexhaustible and nearly indestructible walking machines that needed neither food nor water nor rest but which exploded messily if they were contained or restrained in any way. A guiding artificial intelligence governed their flocking behavior and kept them safe with the help of a small army of the Wanderers' friends and loved ones, soon known as "Shepherds", who, after realizing what was going on, chose to accompany the Wanderers on their route all over the United States. Once they reached Colorado, the flock dispersed to various houses and hotels and bunkhouses in the town of Ouray and went into suspended animation, there to wait in safety while a zoonotic fungal disease ravaged the rest of the world. 

Wayward begins as the Wanderers finally awaken some five years later to begin rebuilding the world, starting with the town of Ouray, which was settled by a handful of their former Shepherds who managed to survive the plague and worked through the years to give the Wanderers a head start when they woke up.

 

The Wanderers have not inherited the entire Earth, however; there are small pockets of humanity with whom to trade and whatnot... and also a small army of militia types who had originally harassed the Wanderers on their Wander at the behest of a radio preacher type, Matthew, (who had a change of heart late in the first novel and became a Shepherd of the wandering Flock), and of Republican presidential nominee, Ed Creel (a thinly disguised Trump figure in most ways, except he's somewhat more competent and less, er, encumbered). Which means Ouray already has Enemies even before the Sleepers Awaken.

Oh, and the artificial intelligence that guided them to Ouray? Also released the original disease that made their pilgrimage necessary, because it had long ago concluded that the only way to save humanity was to kill off most of it before humanity killed off the whole planet. And still thinks it knows best. And has developed an exceptionally horrible way to continue to force the former Wanderers to do its bidding, to whit, possessing the newborn child of the primary heroine of Wanderers and playing off the town's gratitude to warp most of them into regarding it as a kind of God.

Oh, and its presence within the baby isn't very good for the baby, of course. 

And so once again the mighty Shana Stewart, older sister of the first Wanderer and thus the first Shepherd, has a ton of responsibility dumped on her before she's even old enough, by the laws of the former world, to drink. Hers is the child creepily inhabited by the AI in such a way that whenever she or anyone else comes into physical contact with the baby, they get shunted back into the virtual reality in which everybody slept and are thus at the AI's mercy, except long ago Shana saw a possible flaw in its control that can maybe be exploited to free humanity if she and her companions are very, very lucky. 

Soon Shana and Dr. Benji Ray, originally a CDC employee and one-time lover of the original programmer of the A.I., and slightly washed up Irish rock star Pete Corley, who sort of latched onto the flock last novel for the publicity but then used his outsized charisma to help defend them from crazies and poor public opinion as the pandemic started, on a desperate cross-country trip in a jury-rigged prototype solar-powered car to see if they can make it to the CDC's headquarters in Atlanta to find what they need to end the AI's weird and culty reign.

Meanwhile, Creel and his sideshow, who survived the pandemic in a luxuriously appointed former missile silo in Kansas until his employees and subordinates woke up to the fact that he didn't have any power that they didn't give him, emerge and, having assassinated the actual President of the United States last novel, assumes the title of President and starts seeking ways to assert his dominance, with some mysterious high tech assistance of his own. That guides him, also, toward Atlanta.

As the story proceeds, the audio narration duties are shared by the same team who brought us Wanderers, Dominic Hoffman, narrating mostly from Benji's and Creel's points of view, and Xe Sands, from Shana's, but where in the previous novel these were easily divided up into chapters, as more narrative clubs are twirling through the air this time, so there are more shifts of point of view, even in the middle of chapters. Wisely, the producers did not choose to switch narrators every single time this happens, but whenever there is a major shift in the action that will sustain the other point of view for more than a few paragraphs, they do. This leaves Hoffman trying to voice Shana on occasion, not entirely successfully, and Sands to voice Benji and Creel (and Pete), somewhat less jarringly. There was not going to be a way to divide this up perfectly as this is a much less episodic novel, so all I can really conclude is that they did the best they could, the producers. But I only really got annoyed once or twice over the course of a good 22+ hours, so I'll count this as a win.

As for the novel itself, as you've probably surmised, Wayward is a much wilder ride than Wanderers, with more grandly science fictional elements and higher stakes. Wendig keeps it all grounded in character like the pro he is, though, as Shana, Benji and Pete face genuine if occasionally amusing danger but keep their focus on their mission and their found-family love for one another; Shana's sister Nessie, saddled back in Ouray with the care of Shana's uncanny child, tries desperately to hold off the AI's ever-tighter grip on the hearts and minds of the town (with the help of ex-preacher Matthew and ex-cop and ex-Sheperd, Marcy -- Marcy vying with Pete for My Favorite Character); and Ed Creel and his strange allies/adversaries get ever closer to the goal they think will let him -- or someone -- Take It All.

Inevitably there are shades of prior sprawling post-apocalyptic horror, notably Stephen King's The Stand and Robert McCammon's Swan Song (the latter getting explicitly name checked here as the characters notice the similarity of some of their predicaments) but without King's tendency to ignore character agency in favor of forcing them through his predetermined plot or McCammon's overt reliance on The Supernatural for adversity. Nanotechnology and artificial intelligence stand in for the supernatural here, but Wendig keeps these on a relatively tight rein (except, occasionally, where Creel is concerned in the novel's climax, and hey, even as implausible new abilities go, it could have been a lot worse).

All in all, Wayward does exactly what we needed it to: it satisfyingly concludes all the character arcs from the prior novel, points their way into a future without our voyeuristic attention to them, and filled all the middle bits with excellent action set-pieces, spectacular but well-earned character deaths, angst over the fate of a Very Good Boy (a golden retriever named Gumball), and, most importantly, some hope for the future. Which, as this ridiculous year of 2022 comes to a close, is no mean feat.